"Perl is the most significant general-purpose tool to hit the UNIX world in years. If you haven't used Perl, it's a lot like C, with
awk, sed, grep, shell programming, and just about everything else included. In particular, system administrators have found it handy, since they're the ones most often tasked with writing or maintaining convoluted shell scripts. Some test and manufacturing groups at computer vendors are now considering using perl as their one-and-only language for test engineers." --;login, June 1991